Monday, June 6, 2005

Amnesty Hits Back! NY Times Hits Too!!

The US government is running a string of prisons around the world, many of them secret camps through which people disappear, a top Amnesty International official says.

Amnesty International (AI) Executive Director William Schulz criticised on Sunday the administration of US President George Bush for holding alleged opponents in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers.

The rights group representative was pressed to substantiate Amnesty's claim that the prison camp at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of suspects are being held indefinitely, represents the "gulag of our times".

The gulag claim, referring to the notorious prison camps of the former Soviet Union, has been fiercely criticised by Bush, who called the claim absurd, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials.

Schulz said the reference was not "an exact or a literal analogy".

"But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite incommunicado detention without access to lawyers," he said.

The New York Times newspaper said on Sunday that the Guantanamo Bay prison should be closed by the Bush administration, saying it had become a national shame and a propaganda gift to America's enemies.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Wisdom

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.